Fundraising readiness: what to have ready before the first meeting

Begin with under six months of cash left and you are negotiating from weakness, which experienced investors can read in the terms you accept and the speed at which you accept them.

Work backwards instead. If a raise realistically takes several months from first meeting to money in the account, and you want a margin for it going badly, the start date is a lot earlier than most founders plan for.

Revenue last month. Growth rate. Customer count. Cost to acquire one. Monthly burn. Months of runway. Largest customer's share of revenue.

The test is not whether the numbers are impressive. It is whether you produce them instantly and consistently. A founder who has to check is telling the investor these figures are not part of how they run the company, and that impression is very hard to undo later.

Assembling this after the first meeting is where momentum dies. Interest has a half-life, and three weeks of waiting for documents is usually enough to lose it.

• Certificate of incorporation and current company status report.
• Cap table reconciling with filings, including convertible instruments.
• Twelve months of company bank statements.
• Management accounts, however simple, updated to last month.
• Key customer contracts and any supplier agreements you depend on.
• Founder and employee agreements, including IP assignment.
• Any operating licence your sector requires.
• Deck, product demo link, and a short written note on anything messy in the above.

"Growth and hiring" is not a use of funds. It is a category. Write instead what you will have proven by the time the money is spent.

Two sales hires in Lagos and Abuja, a second engineer, and twelve months of runway to move from thirty to two hundred paying customers, is a use of funds. It also tells the investor what milestone the next round will be raised against, which is the question behind the question.

Every company has three or four obvious objections. Small market. One large customer. No technical cofounder. Regulatory exposure. A competitor with more money.

List yours, then write two sentences on each. Not a rebuttal, an acknowledgement plus what you are doing about it. Founders who do this convert scepticism into a conversation. Founders who dodge turn a solvable objection into a decline they never hear the reason for.

The profile on this platform is that preparation, held as structured data instead of a folder. The score shows which parts of the picture are missing, ordered by how much each gap costs, and every point traces back to a rule you can read.

It is an analytical tool for organising evidence. It is not an investment recommendation, and no score on this platform means anybody should or should not put money into anything.

• Runway — How many months you can keep going before the money runs out.
• Data room — The folder of documents an investor reads after they are interested.
• Cap table — Who owns what, and what they paid for it.
• Due diligence — The checking an investor does before money moves.
• Bridge round — A smaller raise to reach a milestone before the next real round.

This guide is general information about how investors read a business and how to present one. It is not investment advice, not legal advice, and not tax advice. For anything specific to your company, take professional advice from someone who knows your situation.